Reliability and efficiency of information technology (IT) infrastructures are heavily dependent on IT management and resolution time for IT related queries and/or alerts. In a typical IT infrastructure, network management systems can provide comprehensive event management, proactive monitoring, alerting, and notification functionalities. Notification can include sending an alert or query to an identified individual or a group of technical support staff at a help desk. At times, the alert or query may be left unattended due to absence or non availability of the individual or the group, resulting in inefficient or unsatisfactory IT management. A possible solution may be an escalation mechanism, in which, if there is no action from the technical support staff within a resolution time period, a notification is sent to another party, such as technical support team leader or manager. A downside of such an approach is that it may cause unwanted delay which may not be acceptable in time critical situations.
In an IT infrastructure, an important aspect associated with network management is notification of an alert to technical support staff (i.e., IT staff). Such an alert may be related to a problem with an operating system or any other software product marketed by a company. Furthermore, IT issues may also be caused by also by hardware failures (e.g., printer offline, network connection failure). Although systems and methods for network management may provide automatic alert notification capabilities, an alert may be left unattended if the technical support staff is offline or on leave. A team manager of the technical support staff may be notified about the unattended alert but this may cause delay in obtaining assistance for the alert. Such a delay causes increased response time and resolution time which maybe crucial in certain scenarios.